INTRODUCTION

The implications of a globally aware international perspective on the analysis of post- 1750 British material culture, particularly ceramics, are still imperfectly understood. In this chapter, a ‘globally aware perspective’ does not mean a discussion of whether North American and Australian historical archaeology analytical techniques are applicable outside their home regions, but rather how an awareness of international events and the increasing globalisation of trade might impact our interpretations of domestic material culture assemblages within Great Britain and Ireland.

The observation that historical archaeology deals with an increasingly globalised world, and that a by-product of this phenomenon is an increasingly globalised international trade market, has become a major point of discussion in the discipline, whether through general theoretical overviews of the topic or more focused studies of maritime trade or even more specific studies of individual material culture types, such as ceramics. British ceramics of the industrial era have been recovered from archaeological sites in Iceland, the Mediterranean, the Falkland Islands, Australia, South American nations, various regions of Africa, and many other countries and regions.

Despite an increasingly broad literature on the analysis of domestic, rather than industrial, post-1750 ceramics assemblages in Britain and Ireland, including south-west Wales, London, St Kilda and Cheshire, our understanding of the impact of the globalmarket and global events on domestic assemblages within Britain remains incomplete. This in turn has implications for our ability to examine a range of interpretive issues relevant to our developing understanding of the archaeological record of the more recent British past, particularly as regards socioeconomic and geographical variation.